Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity

• Monograph
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Studies in Dance Theory Series
• Publication date: Feb 2, 2024
• Pre-Order Here: Body Impossible

Disavowing Virtuosity, Performing Aspiration: Dance and Performance Interviews

• Routledge
• Under contract

Disavowing Virtuosity, Performing Aspiration: Dance and Performance Interviews is a book project comprised of interviews with dance and performance artists and scholars over the course of about fifteen years. These interviews take place from 2006-2023 and are conducted by dance and performance studies scholar-practitioner Ariel Osterweis. Osterweis’ research and writing are invested in questions of virtuosity, race, sexuality, gender, and class. They interrogate the term virtuosity culturally and historically, especially its inherent queerness and entanglement with formal hybridity. Although the project focuses a great deal on socio-cultural and aesthetic issues affecting American artists, Osterweis demonstrates a commitment to international voices, especially concerning the postcolonial and transnational. The book is structured into two main sections, each bookmarked by essays by Osterweis and interspersed with one or two additional essays by guest contributors.

Prophylactic Aesthetics: Latex, Spandex, and Sexual Anxieties Performed

• Monograph
• University of Michigan Press
• Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series
• Under contract

Osterweis’ interest in virtuosity and its disavowal has brought them to their current book project, Prophylactic Aesthetics: Latex, Spandex, and Sexual Anxieties Performed. This monograph observes that from latex to spandex, Gen X has been encasing its bodies and their parts in stretchy materials for several decades. Latex has become a signifier for “safe sex,” while spandex conjures mottos like “no pain, no gain.” Thinking through safety and danger (and/as compression and expansion) in physical cultures of sports, dance, and sex, Prophylactic Aesthetics reveals the ways contemporary dance and performance makers revisit and revitalize corporeal anxieties of the 1980s and 1990s, from the fat-burning compulsion of aerobics to the legal battles of the Culture Wars.

Not merely the stuff of mass-produced yoga pants, Lycra (spandex’s brand name) has allowed for intentionally ambivalent gender presentations in dance forms as seemingly disparate as contemporary ballet and vogue femme. Although it can be made synthetically, latex in its natural form is a fluid born of plants and, as an herbivorous insect deterrent, is a kind of prophylactic unto itself. While latex is a natural or synthetic rubber used in physically active scenarios, from medical gloves in surgical settings to condoms during sex, Lycra is a fiber invented by the Dupont family corporation, as they shifted attention away from their masculinist, militaristic production of gunpowder toward Lycra, specifically targeted to women starting in 1959 to introduce stretch and breath to otherwise restrictive girdles. While Women’s Lib began to reject the girdle, Lycra made its strongest reemergence in the 1980s with aerobics and the “religion” of Jane Fonda.

What kinds of prophylactic dynamics are at play when it comes to latex and Lycra? While latex affords one a certain amount of sexual freedom with the idea of STD prevention, what is Lycra preventing—one’s husband from straying, fat from forming on the body, flesh from spilling beyond the body, fluids from leaking past skin and orifice? Both latex and Lycra would appear to calm bodily anxiety, but their very presence reminds us of the threat of contagion or fleshly excess. While latex both covers and enters the body (as in a condom), Lycra typically functions in contexts of bodily covering. The elastic property of both fibers complicates corporeal assumptions of the internal and external: flexible fabric promises to hold something “in,” to keep some externality internal. As related to class, both fibers are often linked to elite, leisure culture, on the one hand, and mass-produced accessibility, on the other. Osterweis pursues how “prophylactic” fibers supplement virtuosic corporeal pursuits and announce, at times, virtuosity’s disavowal.